Andrew Faulds, the unmistakably loud and thespian Labour backbencher, who has died aged 77, was a House of Commons character who never managed to live up to the role he envisaged for himself. Most actors and entertainers who enter politics suffer the same fate.

Tall, handsome and imposing, Faulds was a man of deeply-held passions, vocally pro-Arab and pro-European throughout his career. But he lacked either the patience or the subtlety to do effective justice to those concerns at Westminster. Instead he became the sort of MP easily written off for explosive rows, spectacular rudeness to colleagues of whom he disapproved and a weakness for having himself thrown out.

There is scope for this kind of parliamentary theatre in a political career. MPs as different as Michael Heseltine, Tam Dalyell, Ian Paisley and George Galloway have all indulged in the kind of histrionics which oblige the Speaker of the day to ask them to leave the premises for a cooling-off period.

But, in their different ways, they all seemed to have a discipline and focus lacking in the Labour member for Warley East from 1974 until his retirement on the eve of the Blair landslide in 1997. For both Faulds and his young leader this was probably a lucky escape: though on the right of the Labour party on many ideological issues, Faulds was his own man and did not take kindly to pagers, spin doctors or other means of modern thought control.

Andrew Faulds was born in what was then Tanganyika, now Tanzania, the son of Matthew Faulds, a Presbyterian missionary. Like many a child of the manse he reacted against the puritanism of his childhood without abandoning its high-mindedness or sense of moral certainty. Educated in Scotland, including Glasgow University, he became an actor, joining Equity as early as 1944, and later a member of the union's council. Among his 37 films was Carver Doone, a clutch of voice-overs and - to small boys listening to BBC radio in the 50s - he was immortalised as Jet Morgan, hero of the spine-chilling adventure series, Journey into Space.

At the behest of the great Paul Robeson, it was said, he also joined the Labour party. Not quite in the Robeson league, the Faulds voice was wonderful then, and remained so to the end. When Andrew Faulds called a Tory opponent "an honourable shit" (1988) or declared that Norman St John Stevas "lacked the capacity to put a bun in anyone's oven" (when the House was discussing abortion) there was not much doubt as to whom said exactly what.

First elected for Smethwick, scene of a famous conflict with racism, in 1966, Faulds was fiercely anti-racist, among whom he sometimes numbered Zionists. When Harold Wilson's government grappled with Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) in then-Rhodesia, Faulds's solution was "hang Smith".

When Enoch Powell made his shameful "rivers of blood" speech in nearby Wolverhampton in 1968, Faulds called him "unChristian... unprincipled, undemocratic and racialist". The Labour government's restrictions on Kenyan Asians with UK passports entering Britain in the same year was also racialist. He was right about that too.

Yet Faulds, who switched to safer Warley in 1974, was not a man with whom to enter the political jungle. He resigned as a ministerial PPS in 1969 and was fired as a junior arts spokesman in opposition (he was passionate about culture too) a few years later. Wilson, it was said, tired of his silliness.

He was reappointed arts spokesman after Labour's defeat in 1979. But by 1982 Michael Foot, a kind and patient man, had had enough and dropped him again.

But he was an active MP, championing causes like the Palestinians and Turkey, even Colonel Gadafy of Libya. In 1982 he was one of a small contingent of mainly Labour leftwing MPs who vocally opposed Britain's military re-conquest of the Falkland Islands. Despite Speaker Thomas's relative generosity to his group, he got himself thrown out for protesting too much.

Uncritical in his affections, fond of good company and foreign trips, Faulds was also capable of being offensive to Margaret Thatcher as few Labour men felt able to be, not least Neil Kinnock. On at least one occasion he laced his attack with sexual innuendo.

That was odd. Married to Bunty Whitfield in 1945 (they had one daughter), Faulds was famous around Westminster as a ladies man, happy to flaunt a young conquest in front of MPs whose private lives were quieter. Many of them admired his cheek.

Bearded and full of Old Testament outrage, he was vain but often very likeable, the "Donald Sinden of the Commons", one sketchwriter called him. Often involved in personal attacks on MPs, even Jewish Labour colleagues, his political opinions were generally more orthodox in a Blimpish way than he might have cared to admit.

In 1983 he backed his fellow-Brummie MP, Roy Hattersley, against Neil Kinnock for the Labour leadership. He called the Channel Tunnel "a silly idea" and opposed the televising of parliament - a medium which an actor should have embraced. Given his fatal flamboyance he may have been wise not to do so. Like so much else it was a lost cause.

Andrew Matthew William Faulds, politician and actor, born March 1 1923; died May 31 2000